A network may be considered a group of stations (e.g., personal computers, servers, mainframes, telephones, etc.) connected to exchange information (i.e., communicate). The transmission medium connecting the group of stations may contain wired and/or wireless segments (e.g., parallel two-wire, twisted pair, shielded pair, coaxial line, waveguide, fiber-optics, satellite, infra-red, etc.). Communication may take place using packets that are exchanged between two or more stations in the group of stations.
Network processing may be considered the management and movement of packet-based communication traffic using network processing hardware. Pattern matching is a key function performed in network processing applications. Pattern matching often includes searching and matching a sequence of characters within a string, or a sequence of bits within a word. Pattern matching may be performed by hardware and/or software systems.